Author: Scott Detrow

NPR House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi made a marathon speech on the floor this week to protest a lack of action on immigration. It highlighted the limits of her power, though she remains a potent force for Republicans to rally...

NPR Enlarge this image President Trump is denying using vulgar phrase at an immigration meeting Carolyn Kaster/AP hide caption toggle caption Carolyn Kaster/AP President Trump is denying reports, from NPR and other news outlets, that in a Thursday meeting at the White House, he disparaged African nations as “shithole countries,” and questioned why the United States would admit immigrants from them and other nations, like Haiti. Trump told lawmakers that the U.S. should instead seek out more immigrants from countries like Norway. A White House statement issued Thursday notably did not deny that Trump used the vulgarity to refer...

NPR Enlarge this image Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist and chairman of Breitbart News, attends a discussion on countering violent extremism in the Middle East on October 23, 2017 in Washington, D.C. Drew Angerer/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Drew Angerer/Getty Images When Steve Bannon left the White House in August 2017, he framed his exile from the West Wing as a promotion, not a demotion. “I feel jacked up,” he told the Weekly Standard. “Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons.” Bannon spoke about using his perch at Breitbart News and as...

NPR Enlarge this image Sen. Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has increased her stature in the Democratic Party in recent years, though deflects the question of whether she will run for president in 2020. John W. Poole/NPR hide caption toggle caption John W. Poole/NPR There’s a small chance that if Saturday Night Live hadn’t been so mean to former New York Gov. David Paterson, Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand wouldn’t be in the U.S. Senate. In late 2008, Hillary Clinton was vacating her Senate seat for the State Department, and the New York governor was trying to decide who should fill it. “It was the stereotypical Mr. Magoo, blind character who does everything wrong and in a sense is actually stupid in addition to being blind,” Paterson, who is legally blind, recalls of the SNL skit. Paterson says his staff advised him to laugh along with the jokes. But when then-upstate New York Rep. Gillibrand came and met with him about the Senate job, she urged him to fight back, saying it was wrong for the show to target a disability. “Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time,” says Paterson. “That consoling and yet strong support she gave me that moment stuck in my mind for a month-and-a-half, until I appointed her U.S. senator.” There were, to be sure, many other reasons Paterson picked Gillibrand: After his initial favorite, Caroline Kennedy,...

NPR Enlarge this image The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Getty Images/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Getty Images/Getty Images For all the negative headlines that 2017 have generated, Republicans are on the cusp of accomplishing two major policy goals that have eluded them for decades, at the same time. The Senate could soon approve oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with its bill to overhaul the nation’s tax code. ANWR has long held an outsized symbolic role in the tug-of-war between environmental protection and the desire to increase domestic oil and gas drilling. In that...

Julie Jacobson/AP When Jessica Leeds was a traveling paper saleswoman in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she told herself that sexual harassment was just a fact of life. “You didn’t complain about that sort of thing,” she told NPR in an interview Friday, which will air on All Things Considered. But an encounter she says she had with Donald Trump on a New York-bound airplane more than 30 years ago was different. As she initially recounted to the New York Times in a story published Wednesday, she says Trump groped and kissed her as the two sat next to each other in first class. “Whether it was 15 minutes or not, it seemed like forever,” she said. The encounter had begun as a “cordial” conversation over an in-flight dinner. Leeds said she had been escorted by a flight attendant from coach to first class, where she found herself seated next to Trump. “They served a dinner. After the dinner was cleared he began encroaching on my side of the seat,” Leeds told NPR’s Audie Cornish. “Mr. Trump started coming over to me and groping me and trying to embrace me. And then his hands started going up my skirt.” Leeds said the assault continued for several minutes, though, as she recalls, neither she nor Trump ever said anything. “I don’t recall saying no, I don’t recall saying stop,”...

(Left) Hillary Clinton speaks to members of the media on Monday. (Right) Donald Trump spoke in Colorado Springs, Colorado, shortly after the Saturday night bombing in New York. Matt Rourke/AP; Evan Vucci/AP Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s responses to the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey, as well as a mass stabbing in Minnesota, were markedly different. Trump on Monday morning called on law enforcement to embraced increased racial and religious profiling as they sought out terror suspects, while Clinton said it’s “crucial that we continue to build up trust between law enforcement and Muslim-American communities.” Here’s what the candidates vying to be the next commander-in-chief said about key topics, as law enforcement tracked down suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. Trump spoke to the morning news program Fox and Friends. Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Clinton held a brief press conference in Westchester County, N.Y. [embedded content] On profiling: TRUMP: “Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are. They’re afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling and they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things. You know in Israel, they profile. They’ve done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they’ll profile. They profile. They see somebody that’s suspicious, they will profile. They...

Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a recent meeting of Russia’s cabinet in the Kremlin. Security experts say Russia is behind the DNC hack. AP Why would Russian President Vladimir Putin want to help Donald Trump win the White House? That’s the accusation from Democrats this week, after embarrassing internal Democratic National Committee emails appeared on Wikileaks on the eve of the party’s convention in Philadelphia. The emails were lifted earlier this year in a hacking breach that security experts have linked to Russian espionage groups. As part of their pushback against the emails’ damning details, many Democrats accuse Putin of trying to help Trump’s campaign. They point to mutually admiring comments between the two men, as well as Trump policy proposals that many experts say would weaken NATO and cause the United States to retreat from the world stage. “Experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, told CNN Sunday. “That foreign actors may be trying to influence our election – let alone a powerful adversary like Russia – should concern all Americans of any party,” said ranking House Intelligence Committee Democrat Adam Schiff on Monday. Trump made light of the accusations on Twitter The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which should never have been...